


Captive Prince Week 2017

by kapteeni



Category: Captive Prince - C. S. Pacat
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Harry Potter Setting, Alternate Universe - High School, Alternate Universe - Organized Crime, Alternate Universe - Orphanage, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Drabble Collection, M/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-08
Updated: 2017-08-09
Packaged: 2018-12-13 00:40:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 3,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11748525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kapteeni/pseuds/kapteeni
Summary: Dayx100 Drabbles for CapriWeek 2k171. Zombie2. High School Tutor3. Pre-canon Paschal POV4. Soulmate marks5. Harry Potter6. Priest x God7. Orphanage Director





	1. July 30

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freedom / "I think **before you came** , he didn't really trust anyone."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning: Violence

Long-sleeves and jeans. Half-balaclava over his nose and mouth. Duct tape around his arms, sans elbows. Sneakers tied, crowbar in hand, Auguste’s old guitar case slung over his shoulder, the handle of a baseball bat peeking out the top. Post-societal soigné. _Apocalyptique_.  


He’d spent the night in an attic that he tried not to think of as a upside-down oubliette, abattoir-in-waiting, or future mausoleum. If he pressed his ear to the trap door, he could hear the groans and shuffles of the dead. So he didn't; he jimmied open the boarded-up window and stepped out onto the roof.  


There was a man fighting in the streets. Laurent squinted; it looked like he was using an estoc to bludgeon in their heads, which had to be the most impractical method. An idiot. But a living idiot.  


Laurent jumped, wondered how quickly he’d die if he twisted his ankle, and rolled as he hit the lawn. Crowbar, skull, repeat. Bloody pieces of scalp stuck to his balaclava, and then there were teeth, pathetic human teeth, determined teeth, clamped around his forearm, and Laurent had time to think _Auguste_ —  


Its head collapsed, and a tall, dark stranger was saying, “Where’d you come from?”


	2. July 31

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Kings** / "It was one kingdom, once."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The optative mood, like the subjunctive, can appear in conditional sentences and in subordinate clauses that express fear, purpose, or temporality. It also can be used independently to express wishes and future possibility](http://www.chlt.org/FirstGreekBook/JWW_FGB38.html)

Laurent was pissed. Everyone knew Damianos was only in the top ten because their school hadn’t switched to weighted grades yet, and he was tutoring because a talent scout told him to round out his college application with something academic, so Damen had decided to knock out philanthropy too. His students were all girls angling for a prom date, even though Damen and Jokaste were so likely to be King and Queen theirs might as well be the only names on the ticket.  


Laurent didn’t even need tutoring. He was fine, except for the optative mood. His teacher just didn’t think he was involved, which was bullshit. Laurent was class president, NHS secretary, had founded the school’s GSA chapter, and was semi-active in the Equestrian society. Just because he only communicated through mass emails didn’t mean he wasn’t sociable.  


“Wow,” Damen said. “You really suck. You know optative is like, the easiest Greek verb form, right?”  


“That’s subjective,” Laurent said, offended.  


“Sub _jun_ ctive,” Damen corrected. He flipped the test over and studied the other side. “Yeah, you did get all those right. Look, I’ve got cross-country in an hour, and I don’t think I’ll be able to get anything through to you by then. You clearly need a lot of help. Are you free next Saturday around seven?”  


“That’s prom.”  


“Do you have plans?”  


“I’m a freshman, but—”  


Damen smiled. Laurent rarely saw it outside a football helmet, not marred by those ugly spandex singlets wrestlers wore, or beaming out at him from the black-and-white front page of the paper. “What you have to remember with optative is that it’s on the very edge of possibility. Maybe not a lot of people thought there would be dual-kings, but some wished there could be. I’ll text you a pic of my tie.”


	3. August 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Legacy / " **He would do anything for his** little **brother** "

Laurent’s visits are innocent enough, and Paschal would have soon forgot them if it hadn’t been for Laurent’s demeanor. He was never content to be bandaged up and sent on his way, but made Paschal explain exactly what he was doing and why. It gets to the point where he has to drag his chest from his student days out from under his cot and crack open his old textbooks; he has been a physician long enough that he knows just how to treat most everything thrown at him, but he can no longer remember how to answer Laurent’s ever present _why’s_ and _but how does it work_ ’s.

And it’s not just Paschal that Laurent questions. Soldiers injured during drills listen as Laurent sits on the end of a bed, legs kicking, and asks what Paschal’s mixing, or why he is soaking linens with alum, or how come packing sugar or honey in a wound heals them faster. When the prince leaves, they laughingly tell Paschal about the time Laurent asked them why swords have the groove down the middle, or why arrows have fletching. A cavalry man had been timidly asked if he would show Laurent how to use a horse pick; a blacksmith had taught Laurent how a bloomery worked. 

Laurent is seven or eight when Paschal figures he should be over the childhood predilection towards constant questioning and asks Laurent why he is so curious. Laurent looks around furtively before leaning forward, like he is about to tell a great secret. 

“Because,” he whispers, “Auguste’s bad.” 

“Bad?” Paschal repeats. 

Laurent nods vigorously, a mischievous sparkle in his eyes. “He’s really good at the big stuff, but awful at the little stuff. And when he’s king, he’s not going to have time to pay attention to everything, so I will.” He looks down at the pack of ice Paschal is pressing to his bruised knee. “What if he falls down like me, but doesn’t know how to make it feel better?” 

Paschal smiles. “Do you tell Auguste everything you learn?” 

Laurent’s brow furrows, and he tilts his head to one side. “No?” he says, with a clear undertone of _why should I?_

“Well,” Paschal says, lifting off the ice pack, “What if Auguste falls down and you’re not there to tell him what to do?” 

Laurent hops off the edge of the bed. “Why wouldn't I be there?”


	4. August 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Courting** / "I speak your language better than you speak mine, sweetheart."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Canon-typical allusion to abuse

“It’ll be alright.”

Laurent hates the idea of having a soulmate, and he knows he’s not alone, even if not everyone is as upfront about it as him. Conspiracy nuts who say the marks are stamped on by the government to keep people from thinking. Mommy bloggers who advise others to keep their kids’ marks covered, so predators don’t come up to them and say their words. Famous Instagrammers who blur them out, hipsters who tattoo flowers around their words until they’re almost illegible, self-harmers who try to cut the words from their skin, myriad cultures where flaunting your soulmate mark is more taboo than nudity. Laurent’s mark is in a tight swirl around his left shoulder blade. For that, he’s grateful. It’s easy to hide, and he never has to look at it. 

“It’ll be alright.” 

It’s what his uncle said to him the first time they met, at the funeral. He had put his hand on Laurent’s shoulder, leaned down, and whispered it into his ear, rubbing circles into Laurent’s shoulder blade. Laurent had wanted to say _No, it won’t be_ , or _Nothing will ever be alright_ , or even _No, he can’t be dead_ but the words wouldn’t leave him. His nails had dug into the palms of his hands; he wanted to scream, he wanted to jump into the closed casket, he wanted to claw at his throat until blood bubbles up and he could make his pain real, he wanted to go home and find Auguste hastily changing the channel and hear his father telling the maid to add an extra plate at dinner. 

“It’ll be alright.” 

Auguste had always said that Laurent’s words meant his soulmate would be kind, and Laurent hates him all the more for taking away even his memories of his brother. Because he recognizes the man in front of him from the recordings of the trial no one would let him attend, looking relieved as the judge ruled community service for involuntary manslaughter. And he knows, with narrowing vision spiraling into the inevitability of fate, that whatever he says next will be printed neatly in white on the man’s dark skin. 

Damianos continued, “You look as if you’re worried about the rain. It’ll be fine, we’re setting up a tent.” Damianos made to pat Laurent on the back, but he flinched, and the blow ended up glancing off his shoulder blade. “Oops, sorry. Anyway, the ceremony will start any minute, as soon as the brother shows up for the speech.” He looked annoyed at the idea of the brother—Auguste's brother—being late, then his attention turned back to the figure he had decided to bestow benevolence upon. “Do you need help?” 

Laurent stayed, paralyzed, wanting to ask why are you here but of course, he knew: the only people invited were the scholarship recipient, her family, and those who had donated money. And he knew just as certainly that whatever he said next would doom him. 

“It’ll be alright.” 

And it was.


	5. August 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Sports / "It's the game I like."**

Damen had seen Laurent before, of course, usually from across a crowded ballroom, looking disdainfully at plates of vol-au-vents. In deference to their families’ blood feud, they had never spoken, though Damen had exchanged barbed comments with the elder, Auguste. And of course he knew that Laurent was somewhere in the throng of fourth years that seemed to make concentrated efforts to trip over the invisible staircases despite how long they had lived there. He even knew that Slytherin’s seeker had been temporarily banned from Quidditch after trying to slip a love potion in Laurent’s goblet.

What he didn’t know was that Laurent was the replacement, and the longer he looked, the less he believed it. The kid looked out of place on the pitch, and was holding his broom like it was not only a mere cleaning instrument, but that cleaning was far beneath him. 

Damen even thought he detected a faint wobble when Laurent pushed off to the coach’s whistle, but then the game had started and he had no time to spare. It was the first game of his final year at Hogwarts, the weather was perfect, and the Slytherins were working hard to gain a sizeable to lead to make up for their missing seeker. Damen’s arms were already starting to ache within the first twenty minutes of the game—he hadn’t trained enough over the summer to keep up his usual stamina, and he made a mental note to add that to the practice schedule. 

The Slytherin beaters were out for blood, and Damen was too busy protecting his chasers to get many hits in himself; Kastor, his fellow beater, was less altruistic. Damen saw him seconds before he aimed a bludger at Laurent, who was hovering placidly (and to Damen’s eye, rather uncertainly) about a hundred and fifty feet above the turf. Damen opened his mouth to shout a warning—there were no Slytherin beaters around to prevent Laurent from getting his face smashed in. Slytherins always cared more about scoring than defending. Laurent swung his broom up just in time to save himself, but not his broomstick. 

The bludger smacked into the wooden handle and cracked it. The crowd gasped; a few screamed. Laurent balanced on half a broom, made a decision, and dropped. 

Damen saw him reach out a hand and grab at the air, as if attempting to take back his broom, then he flipped through the hair, his golden hair streaming out behind him, and Damen came to his senses. Laurent had been far above Damen. He still had time. 

He urged his broom forward, leaning down on the stick to increase his speed. Then he let go of handle, reached up with both hands, locked his knees around the broom, and caught the falling Laurent. The impact almost sent them both flying; Damen’s broom did two unbalanced front flips through the air, with Damen holding on through sheer force of will. Laurent was only clinging the the front of Damen’s robes with one hand—the other was still clenched in a white knuckled fist. 

Damen regained control of his broom and slowly lowered them both down to the ground, to the raucous applause of the stands. And then he saw Nikandros hovering above them, looking pained, and Erasmus’ stricken expression. Laurent swung off Damen’s broom, held up one hand, and opened it. In his palm, a glint of gold. 

Laurent graced Damen with a beatific smile before the hordes of ecstatic Slytherins could sweep him away, and stretched out a conciliatory hand. “I look forward to facing you again this season, Damianos.”


	6. August 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Gardens** / "You were always watching the road."

The flowers were always blooming, here. Laurent had been told that outside the temple walls, these things came in cycles that were called seasons, and one had to wait for the scent of jasmine outside one’s window, or to see the purple hyacinth around the reflecting ponds, or even to be able to walk outside and feel the dew-dampened grass under one’s feet. It seemed an awful boring thing, but maybe they had more time than he did. He wondered what had happened to the man who had told him about seasons; he had been terribly upset, at the time, talking about the snow.

Laurent dipped his toes into the cool water of one of the ponds, feeling the slime-rough bodies of the koi against his skin, and looked at the walls. They were thirty podes tall, sheer marble, and heavily guarded. A feasible plan to scale them would take significantly more time than he had. His attacker had wedged knives into the joints between marble blocks, balancing his weight on the handles as he inched down the wall. It had been clever. Laurent had been surprised no one had thought of it before. But Laurent didn’t have any knives. 

Laurent swung his legs out of the pond and pushed himself to his feet. His heavy robes skimmed over the water, gold-lined hems reflecting in the fish’s eyes and urging their fat bodies to surge upwards, mouths gaping as they tried to bite at his draping sleeve. He turned to walk back inside before a priest came to fetch him, only to find a tall man blocking his path. 

He could see, as if through the stranger’s eyes, the man taking in his alabaster skin, the intricacies of his clothing, and the small golden circlet that rested atop his head; new information was pieced together like a child’s puzzle, each clue settling into a pre-prescribed outline, the shape of it painted onto the outside of a little mahogany box. His brother had made him puzzles like that when Laurent was a child, doing everything himself, from carving the wood to mixing the paints. But that was all irrelevant, now. 

The man said, “You’re the Divine King.” 

The statement, however true, contained a distinct lack of people falling to their knees in reverence, any kind of terrified awe, or even a quick genuflection. Laurent frowned. His attacker had said the same thing, with the same empty piety, and Laurent had reached up to catch the man’s fist a mere daktylos away from his cheek, a few of his fingers snapping from the force of the aborted blow, and that had been it. He shook off the memory, unclenched his bandaged fingers. 

“And you,” said Laurent, “are the Executioner.” 

The man, now that he looked, was not unattractive. In fact, he was quite pleasing to the eye. His brown skin was not smooth, but work-roughened in a way Laurent found oddly titillating, and his curls were thick and dark. He had the muscular build that Laurent had grown to associate with the retired soldiers who came to ask him to heal their minds and keep the dreams away. And more importantly, despite the ceremonial outfit that featured a vicious dagger more prominently than cloth, his face looked kind. 

Laurent had tried to hide his broken hand from the priests, but he never had been able to outwit the High Priest. He had looked at Laurent’s bruised and swelling fingers and intoned the words Laurent had heard every time he closed his eyes since he was thirteen: “If the course of nature is dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a vigorous successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.” 

“Executioner,” Laurent said, “Is it true you grant a last request?” 

“Call me Damen,” said Damen, “And yes.” 

“Damen,” Laurent said, savoring the word, “I have never been kissed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [The Killing of the Divine King](http://www.sacred-texts.com/pag/frazer/gb02402.htm) by Sir James George Frazer


	7. August 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> **Disguise** / "I am the soul of discretion."

“It’s an abusive tax shelter,” Damen said.

Laurent didn’t look up. “A shelter, but I can assure you it's not abusive. Would you like to talk to some of the children? I have a doctor here, but I’m sure that a man of your status can bring in your own to check.” He chewed the end of his pencil; this was not supposed to be an attractive habit, Damen tried to remind himself. 

“You know that’s not what I mean.” 

“I’m not as well-versed in the criminal arts as you are.” Laurent traced the outline of his lips with the pencil. “What am I accused of?” 

Damen had been waiting for this. He clicked open the latches on his briefcase and took out his own papers. “The average annual contribution from a single donor is fifty-thousand dollars. A thousand dollars a week. You receive money from all over the continent.” Damen glanced at the papers, “Twenty-six donors have been arrested for money laundering, drug trafficking, human trafficking, and extortion. Do you inspire criminals to philanthropy?” 

“That’s too bad,” Laurent said. “I suppose it’s good then that I’ve never employed a policy of letting donors meet the children, but I can assure you I don’t vet the source of every dollar that comes my way.” He smiled sweetly at Damen. “When you are in my profession, you take the money you can get.” 

“Last year alone, you took in several hundred million dollars in donations. That’s not including your state-funded revenue, your own significant personal income, nor any adoption fees. Tell me, what are you doing with all that money?” 

“Do you have any children, Mr. Damianos? Not yet? Well then.” Laurent pulled a binder from the bookshelf behind his desk, and flipped it open as he passed it to Damen. “Let me tell you: they’re expensive. This is an cost ledger for one of my twelve years olds. There’s insurance, food, etcetera. He needed new bedsheets, clothes, and sneakers this year, that sort of thing. A modest birthday present. And then he needs private tutoring, school supplies, a recreational sports fee, equipment, and transportation for it all. Every child in my care receives private and group therapy, depending on need. It adds up. If anything, a hundred million is abominably low.” 

Damen squinted at the numbers. He couldn’t tell if they added up, but he was sure Laurent was funneling untraceable money somewhere. “Private tutoring? Therapy?” 

Laurent’s smile grew. “This is less of an orphanage and more a therapeutic boarding school for parentless children. That file your holding? I found him working in a brothel. You can’t inflict school on a kid like that. He couldn’t read. He propositioned authority figures when he felt threatened. His tutor is a nice lady who’s been trained in dealing with troubled youth. Three times a week he goes to a fencing class, and on the weekends he does equine-assisted therapy.” 

“I’m sure it’s a noble thing you’re doing,” Damen said. “But about your own background…would you let someone take care of your children if they had a history like yours?” 

“And which part are you talking about?” Laurent rested his chin on his hand. He was every bit the image of a shady executive: well-dressed, sleek, and devilish. If it wasn’t for the photos framed on the desk, hanging on the walls, and taped haphazardly to any flat surface, Damen would have arrested him on sight. They were pictures of Laurent with children: smiling at the camera, Laurent pushing a little girl on a swing, Laurent standing behind a grinning boy holding a trophy above his head. There were childish stick-figure drawings that prominently featured crayon-yellow hair, a macaroni painting of what might have been the outside of the orphanage, and certificates that proclaimed things like ‘Awarded to Mathilde for receiving honors in academic achievement,’ or ‘Florian, Varsity Baseball.’ 

“Your brother,” Damen said. “He was just cleared of witness tampering charges. Before that it was extortion. Then forging money. Everyone knows he has offshore banks. You were photographed outside his front organization last winter.” 

“I can’t visit my brother?” Laurent stood up, walked to the door, and opened it. “It’s beautiful outside, Mr. Damianos. I promised to show Mathieu how to use a barbecue. You can see yourself out.” 

Laurent watched as Damen tramped outside, but there was nothing the investigator could do without a permit; he had just been sounding Laurent out for weaknesses. 

Nevertheless, he pulled his cellphone from his pocket and dialed his assistant. “I’ve been informed one or more of our honored donors is involved with human trade. Find out who, and show them the errors of their ways, will you? And tell Auguste I’ve got a tail.” He slapped the phone shut and dropped it into the trash.


End file.
